Trouble and Repair in Child–Robot Interaction: A Study of Complex Interactions With a Robot Tutee in a Primary School Classroom

Today, robots are studied and expected to be used in a range of social roles within classrooms. Yet, due to a number of limitations in social robots, robot interactions should be expected to occasionally suffer from troublesome situations and breakdowns. In this paper, we explore this issue by studying how children handle interaction trouble with a robot tutee in a classroom setting. The findings have implications not only for the design of robots, but also for evaluating their benefit in, and for, educational contexts. In this study, we conducted video analysis of children's group interactions with a robot tutee in a classroom setting, in order to explore the nature of these troubles in the wild. Within each group, children took turns acting as the primary interaction partner for the robot within the context of a mathematics game. Specifically, we examined what types of situations constitute trouble in these child–robot interactions, the strategies that individual children employ to cope with this trouble, as well as the strategies employed by other actors witnessing the trouble. By means of Interaction Analysis, we studied the video recordings of nine group interaction sessions (n = 33 children) in primary school grades 2 and 4. We found that sources of trouble related to the robot's social norm violations, which could be either active or passive. In terms of strategies, the children either persisted in their attempts at interacting with the robot by adapting their behavior in different ways, distanced themselves from the robot, or sought the help of present adults (i.e., a researcher in a teacher role, or an experimenter) or their peers (i.e., the child's classmates in each group). In terms of the witnessing actors, they addressed the trouble by providing guidance directed at the child interacting with the robot, or by intervening in the interaction. These findings reveal the unspoken rules by which children orient toward social robots, the complexities of child–robot interaction in the wild, and provide insights on children's perspectives and expectations of social robots in classroom contexts.

[1]  Francesco Mondada,et al.  You're Doing It Wrong! Studying Unexpected Behaviors in Child-Robot Interaction , 2015, ICSR.

[2]  Manfred Tscheligi,et al.  Systematic analysis of video data from different human–robot interaction studies: a categorization of social signals during error situations , 2015, Front. Psychol..

[3]  Wolmet Barendregt,et al.  Augmenting Game-Based Learning With a Robot Tutee , 2019, Proceedings of the 12th European Conference on Game Based Learning.

[4]  Lena Pareto,et al.  Robot as Tutee , 2016, RiE.

[5]  Douglas P. Newton,et al.  Humanoid Robots as Teachers and a Proposed Code of Practice , 2019, Front. Educ..

[6]  Stefan Kopp,et al.  Second Language Tutoring Using Social Robots: A Large-Scale Study , 2019, 2019 14th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[7]  Sofia Serholt,et al.  Breakdowns in children's interactions with a robotic tutor: A longitudinal study , 2018, Comput. Hum. Behav..

[8]  Brian Scassellati,et al.  Social robots for education: A review , 2018, Science Robotics.

[9]  Takashi Minato,et al.  Who Is Responsible for a Dialogue Breakdown? An Error Recovery Strategy That Promotes Cooperative Intentions From Humans by Mutual Attribution of Responsibility in Human-Robot Dialogues , 2019, Front. Robot. AI.

[10]  Cynthia Breazeal,et al.  A Long-Term Study of Young Children's Rapport, Social Emulation, and Language Learning With a Peer-Like Robot Playmate in Preschool , 2019, Front. Robot. AI.

[11]  Ana Paiva,et al.  Empathic Robot for Group Learning: A Field Study , 2019, ArXiv.

[12]  Amanda J. C. Sharkey,et al.  Should we welcome robot teachers? , 2016, Ethics and Information Technology.

[13]  Magalie Ochs,et al.  Brain activity during reciprocal social interaction investigated using conversational robots as control condition , 2019, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

[14]  Vicky Charisi,et al.  Working with a Social Robot in School: A Long-Term Real-World Unsupervised Deployment , 2020, 2020 15th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI).

[15]  Lena Pareto.  A Teachable Agent Game Engaging Primary School Children to Learn Arithmetic Concepts and Reasoning , 2014, International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education.

[16]  Aaron Powers,et al.  Matching robot appearance and behavior to tasks to improve human-robot cooperation , 2003, The 12th IEEE International Workshop on Robot and Human Interactive Communication, 2003. Proceedings. ROMAN 2003..

[17]  Sofia Serholt,et al.  Interactions with an Empathic Robot Tutor in Education: Students’ Perceptions Three Years Later , 2019, Artificial Intelligence and Inclusive Education.

[18]  Ginevra Castellano,et al.  Adaptive Robotic Tutors that Support Self-Regulated Learning: A Longer-Term Investigation with Primary School Children , 2018, Int. J. Soc. Robotics.

[19]  Ana Paiva,et al.  The case of classroom robots: teachers’ deliberations on the ethical tensions , 2016, AI & SOCIETY.

[20]  Agnieszka Wykowska,et al.  From social brains to social robots: applying neurocognitive insights to human–robot interaction , 2019, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

[21]  Austin Henderson,et al.  Interaction Analysis: Foundations and Practice , 1995 .

[22]  Wafa Johal,et al.  Learning By Collaborative Teaching: An Engaging Multi-Party CoWriter Activity , 2019, 2019 28th IEEE International Conference on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN).

[23]  Wolmet Barendregt,et al.  Robots Tutoring Children: Longitudinal Evaluation of Social Engagement in Child-Robot Interaction , 2016, NordiCHI.

[24]  V. Braun,et al.  Using thematic analysis in psychology , 2006 .

[25]  Paul Baxter,et al.  Child-robot interaction in the wild: advice to the aspiring experimenter , 2011, ICMI '11.

[26]  Adrian David Cheok,et al.  Why Not Robot Teachers: Artificial Intelligence for Addressing Teacher Shortage , 2018, Appl. Artif. Intell..

[27]  Arvid Kappas,et al.  Endowing a Robotic Tutor with Empathic Qualities: Design and Pilot Evaluation , 2018, Int. J. Humanoid Robotics.

[28]  Tal Oron-Gilad,et al.  Understanding and Resolving Failures in Human-Robot Interaction: Literature Review and Model Development , 2018, Front. Psychol..

[29]  J.R. Movellan,et al.  The RUBI/QRIO Project: Origins, Principles, and First Steps , 2005, Proceedings. The 4nd International Conference on Development and Learning, 2005..